Trump Could Help Making Voting by Mail Easier. Why Won’t He?

You can't have a normal election by pretending there is no pandemic.

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President Trump’s delay-the-election trial balloon on Twitter last week was resoundingly denounced, and rightly so.

Indeed, so thorough was the repudiation, including from top Republicans, that the president backtracked a little. “I don’t want to delay,” Trump explained in a press conference to discuss the pandemic. “I want to have the election. But I also don’t want to have to wait for three months and then find out that the ballots are all missing, and the election doesn’t mean anything. That’s what’s going to happen.”

Although delaying the election is an abhorrent idea, contrary to what this country stands for, Trump does have a point about mail-in-voting. It could well be a disaster. What’s astounding (though not actually surprising) is that the president doesn’t want to do anything about it.

First, let me explain why Trump has a point. Although his claims of massive and systemic fraud are ill-founded and irresponsible, his point about the vote counting has merit.

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  1. Avatar photo
    Rev Snow

    If there are no concerns about a total vote-by-mail system, shouldn't we be able to agree that we can do away with restrictions on "electioneering" in polling places?

    I can't imagine all that ballot-marking on kitchen tables is waiting until a 100 yd radius is first cleared of every campaign flyer.

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    Rev Snow

    "That opposition melts away during a pandemic"

    No no no. A thousand times no. Jonah you are brighter than this.

    All the reasons you cite in favor of in-person, single-day balloting retain all their force. A pandemic does not negate them at all. A pandemic adds a new factor -- a risk of disease transmission to manage -- that must be balanced against these other factors. It most emphatically does not wipe the slate clean. Conservatives of all people do not tear down the fence to deal with the new variation.

    So when balancing, you leave multiple jurisdictions free to try different things, and then you learn from them. You take notice that an enormous expansion of mailed ballots in the NY primary has been a disaster. You take notice that in-person primaries in WI did not provoke large increases of infection. Am I cherry-picking? Maybe. Add whatever other experiences you like, draw different conclusions, but stop tossing your principled preferences away at the first sign of new challenge.

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  3. Trichwages

    Jonah - serious questions: Why would early voting thwart the popular will? Are those voters’ “will” somehow not included in the “popular will?”

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    1. Trichwages

      And if you already addressed this in other comments, please ignore. I’ll find it eventually 😊

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        Emily

        Did you find it? I’d wondered that too.

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    BWG

    Jonah, I enjoy most all of your columns and podcasts that I'm able to read/listen to, this one included. Wish I had time to take them ALL in. But I think Chris S has a point, a number of your columns have been centered on Trump over the past couple of weeks. Granted he's the biggest, easiest, noisiest, most annoying, most aggravating, most deserving target.
    But there's fertile ground almost everywhere in politics. I'd be interested in your take on some of the tighter senate and governor races. Really enjoyed Sarah and Steve's interview with Gov. Hogan a couple weeks ago, for example. Could be you need a vacation from Trump for a week or so, even if he projectile tweets some reprehensible male bovine fecal matter.

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    Earl King

    I do not think there is wide systemic fraud....but mail in voting, where blank ballots are sent to last known resident is recipe for mischief. I am unclear if for example in Michigan since they won't open mailed in ballots till after election day...if they will bother to look at signatures. What is their policy about "signatures" that don't match. Does it count or get thrown out. The post figures 1% of all mail is mis-delivered...USPS delivered 70.1 billion pieces of mail in 2019. 1% is a hell of lot of mail. We had a Congressional race decided by coin toss. Al Gore lost FL by 500 votes. If someone gets a ballot delivered and wants to vote for whomever....I will unlikely be undiscovered unless the signatures are wrong. But if I'm not mistaken some states count them.
    I agree something should be done but elections are States territory...I'm not sure Trumps magic wand can tell States how to count, when to count, what to count, match signatures. I'm not even sure Congress can pass a law. Hanging chads have moved out of our lexicon....Trump is not wrong Michigan could talk weeks to count several million ballots.

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    1. Avatar photo
      Pat Riot

      If the concern is one person filling out thousands of ballots and mailing them in, those crimes stick out like a sore thumb in the numbers as the NC congressional race in 2018 showed. It took the other party about 10 minutes to notice one precinct was way out of whack, and once they noticed, it took about 10 more minutes to notice the fraud. (Then the guy's son ratted him out in live court, but that's another crazy story).

      And try to imagine somebody risking 10 years in the clink in order to do something like this--so they *might* change a result in one precinct, state, etc. There's a reason why this crime is only committed by morons.

      Statistically, if the Post Office loses 1% of the votes, and they don't know which 1%, then it shouldn't change any result. The exception would be if the lost a whole area's worth of votes, but again that would instantly become known to anybody looking at an election, and both sides will have teams of lawyers doing this like they always do.

      As for the results taking a long time, that... is life with the virus. Nobody is looking forward to election night, but it is, to coin a phrase, what it is...

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    Ray Salemi

    I think Trump gets presented with a lot of problems and answering “Well, what am I supposed to do about it?”

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    Charlie229

    I can't agree with the sentiment that Jonah is on a constant "anti-Trump drumbeat." If you think that, then you don't read The Bulwark.

    Doing something to secure the election would require mobilizing resources, organizing efforts, coordinating diverse and disparate jurisdictions, monitoring progress, and fixing problems as they arise. None of that is possible without labor and a coordinated effort, which was never government's strength to begin with and is especially lacking under this Administration. For years, Democrats claimed the lion's share of policy ideas that were unworkable in the real world. Either their ideas would never have enough funding, or they failed to account for human nature itself (i.e. see The War on Poverty). This Administration takes that to new levels. The President fights trade wars through the pronouncements of tariffs, he needles China without working with our allies, he appropriates money for a wall by fiat, instead of legislation, and he ignores our intelligence community, when it hurts his feelings. All these things have one thing in common. They don't take work, coordination, or the formation of a consensus.

    We are witnessing governance as public relations via Twitter, and that is worth continued discussion, if only because actual decision makers aren't having these discussions. A national, natural disaster, which is what a pandemic is, requires a national response. It will never come, because it takes work and, in almost four years, the President has elected to watch Lou Dobbs et al instead.

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  8. JohnO



    On Trump and election mechanics the multi-dimensional chess board does not exist of course. He thinks low turn out would benefit him, and I doubt the Democrats disagree. For mail-in specifically he may be missing an opportunity to play to a GOP strength in come places and cases as per Jonah, but as per Sarah Isgur's article there's another side to that coin. I guess Trump simply does not think well sorted out mail in ballot system would help him, and it's not certain it would.

    On vote by mail fraud, sometimes people go a little overboard saying what a total non-issue this is. Here in Hudson County NJ there's been serious fraud via Vote By Mail in nominally non-partisan (though everyone running is a Democrat actually) local elections. Some people went to federal prison for it recently. They were caught paying voters to fill out their ballots. But even political operatives 'helping' people fill out of their ballot without an outright bribe can get into a gray area that's not desirable IMO. This is a traditionally relatively corrupt corner of the country. But it certainly can happen, and just counting the times people get caught is not a realistic measure. Suspicion of VBM shenanigans lowered confidence in many elections won by the 'old guard' here before they actually got caught.

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      Pat Riot

      You are talking about *election fraud* which is not the same thing as voter fraud. The latter certainly exists, but as you can see it's drastically obvious when it's done and it's never been known to work. The instance in NC was an example of that going on and it stuck out like a sore thumb in the numbers and the idiots who tried it were instantly caught and put in prison.

      The "vote harvesting" you are talking about is certainly a grey area. Is knocking on your neighbor's door and telling them to vote illegal? How about handing them a mail-in ballot? How about taking it to the post office for them while you drop off yours?

      The solution to this is to remove the "problem" of everybody voting and to make it so everybody votes. The problem with *that* is that such a thing would appear to benefit one of the two major parties over the other, so here we are.

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      1. JohnO

        Whatever distinction you are trying to make in the first part you aren't drawing it clearly enough to be understandable to me, sorry. In the case I mentioned, it was *eventually* proved that 'machine Democrat' operatives had used mail in voting as easier more reliable way to to bribe voters (not paying people to go vote your way, then not being able to know if they double crossed you in the privacy of the voting booth) to successfully cause fraudulent votes (paid for, no gray area) to affect elections against 'reform Democrats' in nominally non-partisan (as per NJ law) local elections. It was 'obvious' enough to be widely suspected and lower public confidence in election results for years, before anyone was caught. Again mis-specified measures (only counting cases where people get caught) and dubious burdens of proof (*prove* the wrong person won because of this) are a problem in my observation among people dug in in the position 'voter fraud is non-issue'.

        The privacy of the voting booth, in person, is best IMO. There are real world circumstances where that's not always possible.

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    rlritt

    In my state they have special locked boxes at city hall and the library.

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    1. Daniel

      Do robots pick them up?

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        rlritt

        Election officials. Who do you think collects the ballots in the polling place? And there has to be officials from both parties. When I was an election judge, any help we gave a voter had to be given by two people, one from each party. We also had to take an oath at the beginning. We all took that seriously.

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        1. Daniel

          Right - but in most states they are scanned at the polling station. If several hundred scanned ballots fall off a truck, questions follow.

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            Ray Salemi

            Every possible imaginable scenario is not actually a scandal.

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    Jeff

    Perhaps others have made this point...a NY Fed judge just made the election there a big fluffy mess by insisting the election process counted non postmarked and those submitted beyond the election date! Even this boy sees a problem if this is what happens nationally. It took 45 days to declare a winner and now there’s a lawsuit involved. This was in just 2 districts of NY. The obvious point is that if there’s a close race manipulation of ballots in a R or D dominated area could be suppressed or “enhanced.”

    The problem in NY was local. https://www.google.com/amp/s/thehill.com/homenews/campaign/510606-maloney-torres-declare-victory-in-ny-primary-races-after-weeks-of-delays%3famp

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